Sketchbook No. 2

In 1858 and 1859, Charles (Carl) Ferdinand Wimar traveled up the Missouri River by steamboat from St. Louis. A painter specialized in depictions of Native Americans, Wimar sought direct encounters with Indians and their traditional ways of life for first-hand observations that lent his paintings greater authenticity. This sketchbooks is one of two sketchbooks that he filled on the 1858 trip. These drawings later informed his dramatic narrative paintings such as The Buffalo Dance (164:1946). Already a vital route in the Americas for millennia, the Missouri River of 1858 was brimming with activity. Settlers, traders, government officials, and Native Americans all interacted along its shores. Many American Indian groups along the Missouri remained powerful sovereign nations and formidable economic and diplomatic forces even as Wimar and many of his contemporaries understood Native Americans to be an inevitably vanishing race.